Hacking the Human Experience Blog

Looking Myself in the Mirror

I thought there would be a point when I would no longer have questions of God. At the end of the last book, this was where I found myself. A point where questions no longer remained. The end of my desire for more knowledge. It was a very comfortable place. I would have assumed I would stay there and yet I realize how ridiculous that would’ve seemed. That you could somehow reach the end of anything. Everything is a cycle. A circular cycle. What was at the beginning will also be found at the end…and in the beginning again.

I can see where I tried to control the cycle. The times when I fought to complete something within a certain time frame. The times when I tried to speed up the natural flow of things…as equally as the times when I tried to slow them down. The times where I tried to inject a wish that would affect the trajectory of the cycle. There were so many times where I tried to control what was coming on the basis of whether it met my needs for safety, approval or control.

So it makes sense, that ultimately there would be more questions. Because if I had no questions it meant that I had killed my own curiosity, and I am designed to be curious. For me, having no questions is a place that will only be achieved at death. Life is more fun with questions and so I allow it to persist. I find solace in my ability to get to the source of the issue at hand. I find divinity in my ability to see the most direct path to the highest possible outcome. I find joy in my ability to find the end to the process of seeking. I find inspiration in my desire to seek something new when I find the end to my current line of inquisition. I find love in my newfound humility, as I listen to a meditation of positive affirmations as I type this.

A sound track I would have judged myself as weak for listening to in my former life as a CEO. A sound track I now consider to be a sign of strength in my life as a Minister. The question I often ask, is which perspective is better? Society would say my perspective as a Minister is the “right” one because it’s more compassionate. As humans, we instinctually recognize compassion feels better than judgement. And yet, we judge ourselves incessantly, while we let everyone else off the hook. At least that’s what I did. I was incredibly kind in my judgements of others. And incredibly cruel in my judgement of myself. So cruel in fact, I rarely looked myself in the mirror, fully. It was a reflection that was met with emptiness. A shell of a person.

Instead, I allowed myself to go on solving the next problem. Finding the next solution. Going to work every day to make enough money for my family to have everything they wanted. A list that never seemed to end. It required 100% positive thinking to tolerate what I had created. A negative thought could never be allowed in, for it might fester and take up residence here. It was a great strategy until it almost killed me. Everything is a cycle and I was trying to avoid the second half of the pendulum swing. Ultimately, I became really good at it…holding the pendulum so high that when it came crashing down it crashed…really crashed.

My refusal to resolve my past had a direct impact on my future. I can hardly believe I am about to type these words. I went from a CEO to a Minister within 3 years. That’s how much God humbled me. Even when I opened a direct channel to God in my writings, I still chose not to listen and then I would question why things were happening the way they were. It’s so obvious and yet…it’s the common choice, to think we know more than God. We call it Free Will and celebrate our ability to exercise it. Yet, I wonder why more of us haven’t found what it was designed for…our life’s true purpose. Instead, I notice Free Will is being used to systematically destroy us with our own choices. We eat food that doesn’t provide ample nutrition to our bodies and then question why the obesity rates are out of control and heart attacks are our number one cause of death. We eat to feel good rather than to feel incredible. We leave our homes during the bulk of our day to go to work to make money to feed our families…and from a place of abundance we choose obesity. I only offer this as a reflection of where our choices may, in fact, be leading to our current condition.

One of chaos. When we look at our lives, it seems we have turned over the reigns of Free Will. Despite so many of us choosing to eat to feel good rather than to feel amazing, it clears it is a programmed response to the food choices we are offered combined with the mass media used to condition us to want it. As a former member of the marketing community who designs this media, I can honestly report that advertising is 100% designed to get you to buy the product. We have not demanded accountability to whether or not buying that product serves the consumer’s best interest. Likely because best interest is hard to measure, however, I would simply offer that in any case, having multi-million-dollar marketing campaigns that create demand for a food supply that is primarily made of processed foods made from chemicals rather than Mother Nature’s ingredients is hard to justify. Yet, as a society we celebrate it.

We celebrate the gargantuan nature of these companies because they provide jobs and economic security. Because the employees who work there make good money. And because we can choose not to eat their chemical-laced food alternatives. In a sense, it makes sense…but fails to recognize how far people will go to make money when it is attached to your ability to survive and thrive as a member of the human tribe. When you look at how far humans will go to earn more money and to make it to the top of this pyramid scheme it is more reminiscent of the movie The Wolf of Wall Street than Little House on the Prairie. What confounds me most is how it’s allowed to persist. Why have we not waken up to this madness? How can we not see that we are a slave force for the corporate machine? How can we ignore corporate interests that are driving our governments?

When they are the largest employers…it makes sense. It’s a circular cycle…every piece of the engine feeds the other piece of the engine. When it’s clear that adjusting one piece will affect all the other pieces we let it sit…but what if we took the time to unravel that? What if people understood that by not stopping this fly wheel of perpetual misalignment that touches every facet of our lives…that every facet of our lives would continue to exist on a fly wheel that’s never slowing down…that in fact will only get faster. Eventually every one of us will have to stop running…the only question is how long will it take you to figure out it’s a hamster-wheel? And when you do, will you try to be the fastest hamster-wheel runner? Will you continue at the same pace? Or will you slowly come to a stop…and get off so you can go forth and use your Free Will to create your Dream Life.

What I’ve witnessed over the last 3 years it that most people I encounter would continue at their current pace, even while acknowledging they are on a hamster-wheel. I would guess around 80%. They defend the hamster-wheel and their way of life. It’s the only thing they know and their thoughts tell them there is no other way. Getting off the hamster-wheel could affect…their family, their way of life, their status…or you fill in the blank. They would rather hold onto the known than to explore the unknown. In the most loving way possible, I offer that this is more reminiscent to the response I would expect from a robot who lacks the program for creative thinking than human Free Will. And yet, I absolutely understand it.

In my life as a CEO, I would have probably chosen to run faster. For me, life has always been a puzzle and I’ve been figuring out the pieces one by one. Every time I’d add a new piece, I would take the time to master it before I moved on. I would have wanted to master the hamster-wheel. It was quite clever of James Collins to brand the hamster-wheel as a fly wheel in the book Good to Great. Personally, that book led to a wish to hit the fly-wheel in my own company. I did an entire analysis so that we could create the fly-wheel of perpetual energy. We never did, by the way. Because the concept is a concept that only works when you have thousands of people pushing the fly wheel forward…it’s not designed for a 5-10 person company where effort is more like a choreographed dance than a symphony building to a crescendo.

God would have to take a drastic step to intervene with the rate I was going. I was beginning to experience 400-500% gains in everything I was measuring. All of my satisfaction indicators were buzzing and I was ignoring the stress, the anxiety, and the fear that I had been promoted to my current level of incompetence. I had never run a company before and quite frankly I worked for corporations most of my career. I’d never even researched small business and yet I found myself running one. And then I started rocking it…landing contracts with Fortune 1000 clients, hiring a team that was arguably the most effective in the industry, and traveling around the world as a professional speaker and published author. How much more Great could it get? At the time, it was a quest to go from millionaire to multi-millionaire.

From here, knowing what I know now, it seems obvious that God would intervene in my mission to become the best hamster-wheel runner on the planet. How could The Creator sit by idly watching me chase money knowing the my true greatness? What would you do if you saw your child taking a hard right into a life of disillusion?

In my case, God had to show me who was in charge. I needed to find humility in order to honor myself enough to seek my true life’s purpose. I had two minor strokes in 2014 that led to the discovery of a hole in my heart that was closed. I was facing my mortality at 37 years old as a mother of 3 children. You would think that would be enough to strip my ego out completely. But instead, it inspired me to become an even greater “success” story. An achievement still rooted in a pursuit of money.

In order, to redirect me God had to have a conversation with me, face-to-face. I was so lost. I thought I was doing everything I was supposed to be doing. I was biohacking my body after getting into the best shape of my life. I ate clean. I slept polyphasically. I worked out incessantly. And I was testing neurotropic drugs, psychedelics and researching conscious awakenings. I was on the path to become the first famous female biohacker. A path that looks more reminiscent of the movie Cyborg than Hot Tub Time Machine. I was still convinced that the key to unlocking my highest potential would be found in my human body rather than in my own divinity.

And so he gave me another minor stroke. Only this time it wasn’t so minor. It was quite complete…actually. This time God killed me, quite literally, so that I could see the truth of everything. And despite my protests, I was sent back for reasons that are yet to reveal themselves. I was resurrected for this moment. Right here. This moment with you.

Thank you for joining me on this field of compassion and humility where I will honestly look myself in the mirror and ask the question, “Am I a living example of my true divinity?” Who knows…it might even inspire you to do the same.